Matthew Lewis: Sketch Left: Complete image. Right: Detail. More sketches here.

Who says idle browsing of Flickr images can’t be productive? While using Doug Marttila's findr hack to browse tag structures on Flickr, this lovely Sketch popped up.

Some background research reveals another page with little more info. The piece is by Matthew Lewis, a “Graphics Research Specialist” at Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD), Ohio State University (OSU). Sketch is from 1998, and the technical platform used was AL, developed at ACCAD by Stephen May. AL is a Scheme-based environment for procedural computer animation, and is still available for Linux platforms.

Lewis calls the piece a drawing machine. In his own words:

The theme of automated drawing crops up again and again. Drawing machines practically constitute a sub-genre of generative art. Lewis’ machine is striking because of its whimsical, hand-drawn quality. It avoids a typical computer-drawn look, and manages instead to capture a more naive form of line drawing.

Matt has been good enough to make more Sketch images available as a set on Flickr. They demonstrate a consistent quality of line, somehow cartoon-like. Click the “All sizes” button to get up close and personal with a high-res version.

Lewis has also created a body of generative work done in Jitter, including some work with genetic algorithms. He also also teaches Jitter at ACCAD. In 2004 he and Hans Dehlinger (one of the original Algorists) presented a paper at the Generative Art Conference in Milan on generative line drawing using photographs. Have a look at his Generated set on Flickr for more images.